Lyons of Nirn
by Toasterman
Summary: Slung halfway across the galaxy by a malfunctioning matter transmitter, Sentinel Sarah Lyons and ten-year-old Arthur Maxson struggle to navigate the strange and hostile environs of a planet undreamt of, with nothing more than their wits and a suit of T-51b powered armor to survive the wilderness of Nirn.
1. Prologue

Prologue

He found her just after dusk, standing at highest point of the coastward ramparts. The night was not overly cold, but here in the north that still meant freezing, so he came wearing his full robes, hood up. She smiled when she saw that, and commented just as he knew she would.

"You still haven't gotten used to the weather of Skyrim, have you, Savos?"

Savos Aren shrugged. "It's hard to get used to icicles forming in one's beard, Mirabelle."

Her name was Mirabelle Ervine. She was one of his closest subordinates, a dear friend, and though she had not even a drop of Nord blood in her veins, one would not be able to tell by the way she owned the cold. She wore little more than a light robe of office, and her hair was left free to the night wind.

"Don't be sour," she said, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him closer to the wall, and closer to her. "I brought you up here for a reason."

Aren stopped himself with a hand on the stone wall. He looked down in that moment, down the shear face of the wall, down the cliff face of the rock that the College was perched upon, and into the murky depths of a gorge that the light of the twin moons just didn't reach. He looked away an instant later and caught his breath. Master mage he may have been, but no understanding of arcane arts could help vertigo.

"I don't know how you find the time to dwaddle up here," he said, straightening his robe front. "The novices are likely to detonate themselves without supervision."

"Which is why I dwaddle up here to keep clear of the blast radius. Now hush and look up."

Aren looked at her, but she wasn't looking at him. He huffed and followed her example, craning his neck to gaze into the night sky.

It was beautiful. Strands of green and magenta and a hundred other hues between crisscrossed the northern sky like veins of precious minerals in a dome of black rock. Masser was out and full to the east, with Secunda lurking just below its lower horizon. Both the moons cast a shade of light across the darkened dome of the world, brightening the tips of the webbed aurorae.

The view was breathtaking, sensational. It was also entirely common for a night at the northern edge of the known world, and Savos Aren felt his toes going numb in the cold.

"Mirabelle—" he started.

"Just watch," she said in her 'Savos, I need you to shut up' voice. "Watch and you'll see."

Aren huffed, tucked his hands into his robe, and watched. The aurorae twisted overhead. Far below, he could hear the echoing crack of water refreezing at the bottom of the freshly darkened gorge. The howl of a wolf reached his ears. The wind picked up and tugged at his pant leg, sending a shiver up his thigh.

"Is there something in particular that I'm looking for?" he said, failing to keep irritation from his voice.

Ervine looked at him. "Do you want this spoiled for you?"

"I want to go to bed, Mirabelle. My scholarly inquisitiveness died with the feeling in my extremities."

"Fine, if you want to take the fun out of it." She thrust a finger into the sky. "There."

Aren looked. "I don't see anything."

"Of course not from over there. Look down my arm."

He hesitated, but finally leaned in, sighting down her arm like an archer down an arrow. He focused beyond the tip of her finger and out into the indefinable point in space she was indicating. Besides the darkened sky and a twist of an aurora, he saw nothing.

"Mirabelle—"

"Give your eyes a minute to adjust to it," she said.

"Adjust to what?"

"Keep watching."

He watched, flexing his toes in his moccasins in a vain attempt to keep the blood flowing. He liked Mirabelle Ervine well enough. She was a good teacher, a strong second, and a fantastic bedfellow when no one was looking, but this impromptu stargazing was beginning to make him hate her. And he didn't want to hate her, what with how frequent her role as a bedfellow was becoming.

He opened his mouth to complain again.

And then he saw it.

A distortion in the sky, not unlike the warp lines created in a pane of glass when heated. It twisted and slid in the air, fluid and mercurial, impossible to focus on for more than a second or two at a time. He stared at it out of fascination, but also out of a worry that if he were to look away, he might not be able to find it again.

"What in the Eight…"

Ervine's arm left his cheek. "You see it," she said. It wasn't a question.

He nodded, not taking his eyes off the phenomenon. "And I don't know what it is."

"It cannot be magical," she said.

He didn't reply right away, largely because such a definitive statement went against everything he knew as an Arch-Mage. It was the duty of a good mage to discover the purpose and means behind any phenomenon, and a life spent pursuing the arcane arts—living a life drenched in magic—had taught him to never discount the combined powers of the mind and the forces of creation.

Yet he found himself agreeing with his Second. Ervine was right; if this ripple in the sky were magical in nature he would have felt it. He was too attuned to the world around him not to notice a stable magical event happening a mere thousand feet above his College.

"How long have you been seeing this?" he asked.

"Almost a week. It happens this same hour every night."

"Have you told anyone else about it?"

"Not a soul." He could feel her looking at him, could hear the smile in her words. "I wanted to share it with you."

"That's much appreciated," he said, meaning the words if not feeling them. At this point, he had trouble feeling much of anything, and it had nothing to do with the cold.

Even if this disturbance wasn't magical, the rest of the world around it was, and that world was reacting to the event in a way that Aren was highly perceptive to. The environment was coiling itself in defense, the unseen energies around him preparing for an occurrence like a pugilist bracing against an incoming blow.

Aren drew his hands from the folds of his robe and held them at his side, ready for anything.

"Mirabelle, I think it best if we get inside for the night."

"Is it really that cold?"

There was a crack of thunder, preceded by no lightning and followed by no echo, so loud and forceful that it blew the snow from the wall and knocked Aren's hood from his head. He flinched out of reflex, and Ervine let out a yelp of surprise.

"Inside," he repeated, directly to her.

"Agreed."

They had just begun to move when another crack split the air, followed by another gust of wind. Aren felt the world tense up, coiled tighter than before. A third crack, fourth, fifth. The sixth split just as the two mages made it to the colonnaded doorway that led deeper into the College. He turned then to look back as a flash of white peeled back the night, emanating from that thousand-foot above mark where reality had bent just a few minutes before.

The flash was instantaneous and gone a second later, but it was fast and bright enough to burn an image on Savos Aren's retina: an image of a figure in the sky, arms tucked to its body, legs flailing in mid-fall.

Thankfully, he had the presence of mind to pull Ervine to himself with one hand, and with his other, cast up a masterful ward around the both of them.

The falling body hit his ward like a giant, forcing him onto his knees. The body bounced askance. He heard the sound of a tremendous weight colliding with stone and the crump of the courtyard cobbles shattering.

Ervine looked up at him. "What in the Eight?"

"No idea," Aren replied, breathless. The impact on his ward was so powerful that it had knocked the wind from him, but he was doing his best to hide it. He needed practice.

He was just getting to his feet when doors started opening and shutting in the courtyard below as the entire College reacted to the commotion. Walking to the wall, the sky above him fully repaired, Savos Aren looked down into the main yard of his college for mages. The rock on the wall next to him was gone, blasted away as if beaten by a great hammer. Below, the path leading through the courtyard was shattered. Just beyond the gash, surrounded by scholars and novitiates alike, lay the body that had fallen from the sky.

It was massive, over two meters tall at least, and clad head-to-toe in dull silver plating. A heavily muzzled helm covered the head, and a blackened visor hid any glimpse at the wearer's eyes. It groaned as it lay there, like the mechanical sighing of a Dwemer ruin, and the snow around it turned to steam from the heat emanating off its metallic skin.

But that was all secondary to the eyes of Savos Aren. The thing that caught his gaze immediately, and the focus of all those around the body, was the child it bore, protected against its chest in a closed-arm grip.


	2. Brotherhood's Fall I

Brotherhood's Fall I

J'zargo had a fine nose. All Kajiit had fine noses, but most of them deadened the sense with bottles of skooma and snorts of moondust. J'zargo had never partaken in such things. To him, the call magick—of the world beyond reality—was far too powerful to waste time chasing artificial visions and fleeting false happiness.

He took pride in his nose every bit as much as he took pride in his apprenticeship at the College of Winterhold. It had served him well throughout his travels, rooting out ambushers, pickpockets, and the occasional cuckolded husband armed with a battle axe.

And now, standing in the College courtyard, his talented nose smelled death.

The death stench cloyed like ash to the silver body that had fallen from the stars. He smelled spent flame and wilted vegetation; smoke-filled air and the thick copper scent of diseased blood. The stench was overpowering, and J'zargo found himself backing away from the figure even before backing away had become an order.

"Stand aside!" someone was shouting. "Give it room!"

That someone was Savos Aren. The Arch Mage was old, but he could belt orders with the best of the Legionaries when the need arose. A mysterious golem falling from the sky in the middle of the night, more heavily armored than a knight and growling like a beast from the depths, was more than enough good reason. The rest of J'zargo's fellow novices, and a number of the faculty, joined him at the courtyard's periphery.

Onmund fell into place alongside the Kajiit. He looked troubled, something he did often and quite well for a Nord of his size. In the month or so that J'zargo had known him Onmund had gradually come more and more to resemble a great sea cow. Strong yet timid and ponderous.

"What is that?" he asked.

J'zargo snorted. "Yes, because I would know."

Across the way, the Arch Mage approached the prone figure. His closed fists flickered and glowed, the fire in his palms showing through his flesh. Aren was taking all necessary precautions. If the steel body moved, he would not hesitate to burn it. Mistress Ervine walked at his side as always, her own fists ready and glowing.

"What is that?"

"Shut up, Onmund." J'zargo looked over to see Brelyna Maryon, her blue hood up in the cold night. "Watch them."

"Yes, Mistress," said Onmund.

J'zargo grinned. Of course Onmund was being sarcastic. Maryon was no more a teacher than J'zargo was a native of Black Marsh. She was a novice just like them but her Breton blood and rudimentary knowledge of the arcane prior to her entry into academia gave her a superiority complex. Some days it was cute, other days it was irritating. Tonight was one of the latter.

J'zargo would have added a quip of his own if it were not for that stench. Even twenty paces away it was nearly overpowering. His eyes watered from the cloying irritants in the wind.

Arch Mage Aren bent down to the figure and pried one of its arms from across its chest, letting the bundle of cloth in its grip roll free onto the broken cobblestones. The bundle shifted and the cloth rolled away, revealing what J'zargo hadn't noticed until now.

The giant carried a human child, and if his nose was any indicator to go by, that child was bleeding to death.

Aren did not seem surprised, but he was clearly concerned. "Colette!" he shouted, bringing the bleeding child into his arms. "Colette! I need you!"

Professor Marence was at his side a moment later, her apothecary satchel thumping against her leg as she ran. She went to her knees alongside the child held in her superior's arms and set to work, glowing tendrils of magicka connecting her palms to the little boy's wounds.

As they set about healing the boy, J'zargo turned to Onmund. "I am in agreement with you," he said. "What is that, and why does it bring a child along with it?"

((()))

It wasn't long after Marence and Ervine took the child away that the Arch Mage rounded up all the men, both students and teachers, and orchestrated the hauling of the silver body into the Hall of Elements. After thirty minutes, a dozen telekinesis spells, two nosebleeds, and an uncountable amount of cursing the group finally managed the one hundred meter drag.

The Arch Mage followed behind them, putting no real help into the effort. He let the importance of his office ward off any questions. He was the Arch Mage, headmaster of the College. No one expected him to participate in the labor anyway.

But the truth of it was much different. Casting the ward to block the falling body had taken more out of Savos Aren than he was prepared to admit, even to himself.

"Put it in the center, please," he said, gesturing to the heart of the Hall of Elements. "And one of you novices fetch a mooring chain."

"Mooring chain?" asked one of the students. "Like for a ship?"

Aren let Master Faralda respond for him. "Did the Arch Mage stutter? A mooring chain, morons!" she shouted. "Find one in the storechamber and bring it here! All of you!"

As the students scampered out of sight, Aren strode to the side of the silver figure and knelt by it. The growling emanating from its iron belly had never stopped since it landed. Heat washed from vents along its back, and the flagstones at his feet were warmed by its presence. It was as if the golem possessed the heat of the Red Mountain itself within its shining breast.

Tolfdir joined him. "What do we do, now?"

Aren grunted a chuckle. "You assume I have a plan."

"I do." The old teacher grinned. "You've known what to do since you saw this plummet from the night sky."

"A fine compliment."

"An accurate assessment," Tolfdir countered.

Aren took a breath and held up his hands. With the briefest concentration, his fingertips began to shimmer a quiet violet, the color quickly spreading to his eyes. He rested his digits on the cold steel of the body before him and let the magick spread from his nails in a ripple across the chest of the beast. Respectful and only as intrusive as a feather brushing flesh, the spell soaked in the shape and essence of whatever lay within the automaton and returned to his grasp.

Aren removed his hands and his eyes faded back to their natural red. "It's alive," he said.

Tolfdir looked at him. "Come again?"

"This isn't a machine." Aren pointed at the head and the blackened visor stretched across it. "It's a suit. There is life within it."

Faralda stepped closer to them. "Then we should kill it," she said.

"What?" Tolfdir nearly shouted. Aren's response was more measured.

"Please elaborate," he said.

"That thing arrived with an explosion, crashed into the courtyard like a catapult munition, and growls with the power of a flame daedra. When it wakes it will only cause pain." True to her nature, the master of destruction had yet to release the balls of lightning gathered in her closed fists. She looked right into Aren's eyes. "You feel it too, sir. Its power. We should kill it while we have the chance."

Tolfdir scoffed. "A violent and single-minded solution. There is an opportunity to learn here. You cannot throw that away, and you especially cannot kill something before even giving it the chance to speak for itself."

"Pointless naivety." Faralda stared at him. "You're a fool."

The old man made to respond but Aren silenced him with a hand to his shoulder. "Thank you for your input, Master Faralda. I will certainly take it under advisement. In the meantime, please go watch the door. I'm sure our illustrious faculty advisor will be waking before long and will likely be curious about our new friend. Do your best to direct his attention elsewhere."

For a moment she seemed ready to argue, so Aren gave her his best Arch Mage hard glare to make her think better of it. She left without comment, passing the novices on the way out as they returned with an anchor chain held among the lot of them.

"Senseless brat," Tolfdir muttered.

"Let it go," Aren said. "She has a point, flawed as it may be."

"Extremely flawed."

"Just help me secure this chain, you cantankerous bastard."

((()))

Mirabelle Ervine sat back on her haunches and took a long breath. Healing wasn't her forte, and spending the past twenty minutes assisting Marence in repairing the little boy's wounds had stretched what little restoration skill she had to the limit. Her wrists ached from over channeling, and the nerves in her fingertips were on fire. She wringed her hands in her lap, trying to ease the needles away.

"That was horrible," she said.

Marence nodded. "Four shattered ribs, a broken arm, twelve major lacerations and a concussion."

"I suppose that's what happens when you fall from the sky with nothing but an iron giant to break your fall." Ervine looked at the child, swathed in his torn coat, unconscious on the chamber's only bed. "Did we get everything?"

"Everything that I could see," Marence replied. "So yes. Everything."

"Sure of yourself."

Marence shrugged. "It's what I do."

The women were silent for a long moment, sitting and watching the shallow breaths of the child from the sky. Eventually Marence broke the silence.

"Do you have any idea where—"

"Not a bit," Ervine said. "We were just standing there and this kid and whatever that other thing was came falling out of the sky. I don't think Savos saw anything, either."

Another long silence, and again it was Marence who broke it, but this time the Professor of restoration was grinning.

"Savos, huh?"

"Oh, shut up."

"Not 'Arch Mage Aren' but 'Savos'."

Ervine tried to keep her own grin from her face. "I mean it. Shut up."

"Fine, I won't push it."

Silence.

"Savos."

"The school of restoration is a joke."

"How dare you!"

((()))

Two hundred feet of chain bound the silver sentinel to the floor, each link the size of the figure's head. The ends were bolted in place by large Dwemmer pins enchanted enough to hold a rampaging daedroth in place. The threat was restrained and Aren was satisfied. Whatever the reason this armored woman had for breaking his courtyard could be discovered on his time.

"Well, we have a comatose behemoth chained to the floor and nothing to do tomorrow," Tolfdir said, not looking up from the bolt he was in the process of triple-checking. "What now?"

Aren's brow was furrowed in thought. "I want to attempt a meld."

Tolfdir laughed. It was only when Aren didn't join him that the man turned to look at his superior, his face incredulous.

"You can't be serious," he said.

"Only a light meld, Tolfdir. Just to graze the surface. The subject is unconscious, so there should be minimal backlash. Just immediate remembrances and sleeping thoughts. The shallow end."

"There is no shallow or deep with that." The master of alteration was on his feet now. "A soul meld isn't something to be played with."

"I don't intend to play, Professor."

"I still don't believe—"

"Tolfdir, we have no idea what this woman is capable of. We haven't even seen her face. We have no idea what she can or will do when she regains consciousness. For all we know she could rip through her bindings and kill all of us. We've brought her into the heart of our college—into our home—and I do not want to risk the lives of everyone under my protection on the feeling that she will be friendly enough to chat when she wakes up and finds a multi-hundred pound mooring chain holding her against her will. I cannot do that.

"Either I meld souls and discern her temperament for myself or I take Faralda's advice and heat this woman's helmet until I hear the squeaky sound of brain cooking. Either way, the security of this college and its pupils comes first." Aren locked eyes with his friend. "So, if you would kindly tell the children to wait in the hall, I would appreciate your assistance in this."

Tolfdir looked at him for a long moment, his jaw clenched in frustration. It had been so long since their last disagreement that Aren had forgotten what the old man looked like when he was angered. The sight was comforting, in some way. Proof that they hadn't lost everything with their age.

"Fine," he said at last, turning to face the novices. "Everybody out! Classes will resume at their scheduled time. Thank you for your assistance in this matter."

The dozen or so students protested in a grumbling chorus, undercut by Tolfdir's hurried excuses as he ushered them out the door. Aren paid the noise little mind, instead kneeling again at the warrior woman's side. He cracked his fingers and listened to the rattle-breath of the machinery in her strange steel suit.

Tolfdir joined him a moment later, once they were alone in the sealed Hall. He sat on the opposite side of the body, his legs crossed before him. He drew a set of attenuator crystals from his satchel and arrayed them on the stone floor, sorted according to size.

"You look nervous," Aren said.

"I am," he replied.

"Whatever for? You and Dunlain practically wrote the book on soul melding."

"Dunlain wrote the bulk of the text, I merely added to it." Tolfdir shook his head. "But a lot of the principal theory remains untouched and untested. It's an imperfect art."

Aren smiled, but he felt the worry as well. Soul melding was a largely theoretical part of the arcane arts. It didn't fit into any prescribed school, had no real standard practices and little work in the field was properly documented. In that way it was much like necromancy had been just a few short centuries ago: a preoccupation deemed dangerous by the larger arcane community.

But while necromancy had been shunned and abhorred, soul melding was treated as an impossible challenge—something a professor would scrawl on a board to keep first year students up at night, their minds tangled by the very idea.

In principle, a soul meld worked very much like a soul binding, at least in that there was a soul gem involved. In practice the meld was something between ripping two souls partially out of their bodies and forcing them both into the same gem for a limited time. The gem provided a neutral space where both entities could share thoughts, concepts, memories—the basic components of a human being.

"Don't get lost," Tolfdir instructed, holding out an ice blue gem the size of a man's fist. "Give me some lift?"

Aren gestured and a shimmer of power enveloped the gem, bearing it aloft. He focused and the gem became absolutely still, fixed in space less than a foot above the woman's silver chestplate.

Taking a deep breath, Tolfdir set one palm on her chest, the other on the gem. Aren watched the old man's mouth moving as he murmured in spellcant, a hushed language rarely spoken beyond their circles. It was a tongue meant to focus the mind and bring one closer to the magicka that coursed through his or her veins.

It began to work. Aren felt the temperature in the Hall drop and rise in a rhythmic manner, as if the entire chamber had some kind of inclement heartbeat. Moisture gathered on the stones beneath him only to flash-freeze in the ensuing cold. Aren shivered out of reflex.

A column of light built between the hovering gem and the heart of the warrior machine beneath it. The body suddenly bucked, its back arching. The chains strained and clanged. Something beneath the heavy muzzle of its helm gasped in air.

"Tolfdir—"

"Still comatose," was the distracted reply. "This is normal. She'll ride it out."

The light column grew thicker and stabilized, and the body slumped back to the ground. Tolfdir opened his eyes and leaned back. The gem hovered in place, connected to the soul beneath it by the tendril of magicka.

"It is ready." Tolfdir stood in a chorus of popping joints. "You may attempt to liaise when you're ready."

Aren looked up at him. "You aren't staying?"

"No." The old man shook his head. "I want no further part in this. I've spent too long working with melds to watch another one go awry."

"I appreciate your confidence."

"Savos, I have no doubt it your skills. You're a far better mage than I'll ever be. But this melding business?" Tolfdir shook his head. "I just don't like to be reminded of my failures."

He walked away, heading for the door. "When you are done, you can find me tending to the child with Mirabelle. Good luck."

"Likewise," Aren called, turning back to the gem.

He closed his eyes and reached out, his fingers slipping around the gem and taking a firm hold. Flicks of witchfire teased the hairs of his palm, singing the flesh in pleasant little pops. The gem was cold in his hand.

Savos Aren dropped the barrier to his heart and tasted the blood-raw remembrance of a war lost in the stillborn future of a dead world.

**Author's Note: Hey all, thanks for jumping aboard for this new story. Just wanted to give a quick rundown of how this fic is going to work. Right now I'm aiming for one chapter a week, and I don't see that changing for a few months. If it does I'll notify you here in one of my frequent but tiny author's notes.**

**Originally I had planned to tell the story of how Sarah Lyons and Arthur Maxson got to Nirn. I ended up pushing that to next week to make room for some more characterization of the College characters and the introduction of this soul melding thing, which will be used as a framing device in the coming chapters as we tell the fall of the Brotherhood of Steel.**

**In short, thanks for reading, tell me what you thought, and I'll see you next week!**


	3. Brotherhood's Fall II

Brotherhood's Fall II

The matter transmitter groaned to life and banged out a series of deafening cracks. The tesla pillars that fed it with energy, each set at one of the four corners of the transmitter pad, crackled and sparked and sent arcs of lightning across the chamber, scorching walls and frying computer consoles. The accumulated energy of a nuclear knighthood poured into the machine, starving their Citadel's generator room. Chaotic shadows played across the walls and the laboratory lights dimmed.

Owyn Lyons stood outside of the transmission platform, though he hovered very near the red stripe that denoted the edge of the fluctuation area. Anything beyond that stripe ran the risk of being atomically shredded in the material fluctuations exuding from the heart of the platform. That risk was all that kept Elder Lyons's impatience in check, and ensured that he didn't run into the danger zone.

Still, it did little to keep him from shouting over the booming tears in the air. "Talk to me, Reginald!"

Scribe Rothchild shouted back to him from across the chamber, not taking his eyes from the master console that he worked, fingers flying across the keys. "It should stabilize any minute now!"

"They don't have a minute!" Lyons marched around the room, tracing the thin red line with perfectly placed footsteps. Scribes scurried out of the way, partly due to his rank, but mostly due to the bone crushing threat of his ancient T-51b powered armor. "Get them through, damn it!"

Rothchild was silent; he was typing too furiously and running too many calculations in his mind to reply. At the heart of the platform, three metric tons of city debris and junked Corvega remains—what the scribes referred to as 'displacement material'—began to ionize. Flashes of light from the tesla coils snapped at the detritus, rendering it more transparent by the second.

Lyons stood by his Senior Scribe and watched the transmission begin to take hold. The fluctuations stabilized, the power output began to regulate itself. There was a final, monumental flash of light, and the debris on the platform was gone.

In its place stood Lyons' Pride: five power armored warriors, the best that the Brotherhood had to offer. They stood as they had on the field of battle, their weapons in firing positions, knees locked to take an incoming charge head-on. A sixth member lay at their feet, bleeding from two score rents in his steel war plate, with two of his brothers standing above him in defense.

A seventh body had come through with them—a hostile body caught in the matter transmission field and brought back to the Citadel by accident.

The super mutant was either unaware of the change in its surroundings or just did not care. It attacked either way, roaring as it charged into the Pride. It seemed to go for the wounded member, but was blocked at the last instant by the squad's leader.

Sarah Lyons crashed into the mutant, the end result of a movement begun two seconds and twenty miles away in the heart of a DC ruin. She smashed the monster in the stomach with her armored shoulder and drove it away from her team, down from the arrival platform and into the laboratory proper.

The pair crashed through a table and tumbled onto the floor. Sentinel Lyons drove her ripper hilt-deep into the monster's ribs, grinding sparks and chunks of mutated flesh out across her visor. The mutant punched her in the head. Its fist rang dull against the steel of her helmet.

The beast hurt its hand nearly as much as it hurt her head, but it drove her away for the instant necessary for the creature to bring its oversized pistol to bear. It was in that moment between aiming and firing, between life and death, that Elder Lyons decapitated the mutant with his super sledge.

It was as elegant a stroke as one could manage with an oversized power generator mounted on the end of a titanium stick and swung like a club—which was to say not at all—but it did the job. The mutant's head detonated in a burst of toxic crimson meat, spattering blood and braincase across the platform. The corpse fell to the deck with a wet thud.

The Elder lowered his weapon and pointed at the wounded Pride member. "Medical attention. Now."

His words were obeyed without question. A med team, one that had been on standby in the wings of the laboratory since the transmission attempt began, rushed in at once. Paladin Vargas, by now unconscious from blood loss, was carried from the chamber with the help of his teammates. Their leader remained.

"Clear!" Rothchild shouted, swatting at the buildup of smoke over his console. "Somewhat."

"More problems?" Lyons asked.

"Perhaps."

"I need sureties, Reginald, not mayhaps and kindasorts."

The chief scribe fixed his commander with a glare. "The transmitter is likely shot. Too many jumps, too frequently. I may be able to restore it to working order but it will take time."

"So, no more raids. We'll make do without it. In the meantime, please work to restore it."

Rothchild grumbled something about overwork and fixing too many things at once, but Lyons pretended not to hear it. The old scribe was under enough pressure. Instead, the elder took a breath and turned to his daughter.

"Sarah, are you well?"

He watched his daughter unclasp and remove her helm. The face beneath was lined with fatigue. Her blonde hair was pulled back by a tie and matted to her scalp by the same sweat that oiled her flesh. Blood ran from a cut above her right eye but she paid it no mind, instead fixing her gaze on her father.

"You're armored," she said simply. It was a fair point; to Owyn Lyons's recollection, his daughter had last seen him dressed for war on her tenth birthday, nearly seventeen years previous.

Sarah watched her father smile. It was a weary smile, utterly without mirth—the smile of an old man doggedly resigning himself to fate.

"Did you find anything that says I can take this off, go back to bed?" he asked.

"No," she said with a sigh. "No, I did not."

((()))

Like her father, Sarah Lyons wore a suit of T-51b powered armor. Between the two of them, they possessed the only two working models of the armor in the entire DC chapter. Unlike her father's ancient model, Lyons's suit was not a relic trucked across the continent from the Brotherhood's western bunker, but rather a recent discovery in the northern DC ruins. So far as the scribes could tell, the suit had never been used before, and had less than a week's worth of active time on its internal reactor.

Sarah caught a look at herself in a cracked mirror as she followed her father through D Ring. Even covered in blood and dirt the armor looked fresh, untouched by the deterioration that surrounded it. Lost tech—a blip of light in what was rapidly becoming a dark future.

"What did you see?" her father asked.

"Just what we expected." Sarah fell back into lockstep beside him. "They control the Mall."

"How many were they?"

"Impossible to say for sure. We were there for six minutes, and we were fighting for every second. We lost Clovin almost immediately upon transmission. You saw Vargas."

Her father nodded. "Do you have an estimate?"

Sarah took a breath and played the situation back in her mind. It was hard to remember anything outside of the chaos and explosions, but she remembered the tide that descended upon and broke against the Pride's gunline, forcing them onto the higher ground of a trench berm. Dozens of super mutants, all roaring, all charging directly toward the Pride.

That's when a grenade took Clovin's leg off at the knee. He fell to the ground and was set upon by three of them. There wasn't enough time for even the shock to set in. He died screaming.

She remembered getting to the top of the berm and turning to look out across the Mall. She saw an ocean of orange-brown flesh, stretching before her from the Washington to Lincoln monuments, composed of hundreds of small wakes separated by the massive forms of Behemoths, trailing their smaller kin like breakers in the surf.

She watched as the ocean rippled and shifted as it moved and came about, turning to bear down on her tiny squad. It was a fight that they would have lost had the transmitter not pulled them out when it did.

"At least two thousand," Sarah said, blinking her way back to the present. "Maybe more. Probably a lot more."

"Something has organized them," said her father.

"Perhaps the Behemoths? There were at least three that I could see."

"All evidence points to an even lower intelligence level in the Behemoths than the rest." Her father stopped at the bottom of the exterior stairwell to the Citadel ramparts and turned to her. "Which is all irrelevant at this point, I suppose."

"What do you mean?" Sarah asked, even though she already knew the answer.

"The super mutant raids on our perimeter have only grown in recent days, and what you've just told me does not put my mind at ease."

Elder Lyons sighed, and in that moment, despite the half ton of ancient steel and synthetic muscle encasing his form, Sarah's father looked every minute of the seventy-three years old he was. The weight of command, his self-styled obligation to protect the Wasteland, and every battle he had ever fought was writ large in the lines and wrinkles of his weathered face.

Sarah Lyons wanted very much to hug her father, but the weight of her rank and position as his second-in-command stayed her feet as much as her armor would had its reactor been suddenly ripped from its socket.

"They're coming here," she said instead, sealing that moment of weakness and hesitation away where it could fester, grow and be revisited in the silence of a hundred early mornings and solitary walks for the rest of her life—the nagging regret of a little girl grown beyond her fallen father.

Her father nodded. "Yes."

"Should we evacuate?" she asked. "We can mobilize and head south, rebuild in the swamps or—"

"No, Sarah." The Elder straightened, his weariness vanishing as suddenly as it had appeared. "We stand as we always have. We can break them here. We might die doing it, but we can break the tide, and maybe then the Wasteland will have a fighting chance."

He turned to climb the steps to the ramparts and Sarah followed him. Outside, the failing light of dusk was settling across the wastes. The chem-stained clouds had slowed in their roiling tumult as the temperature dropped for the coming of night. In the distance, the ruins of Old DC were lit amber in the light of the setting sun. Beyond the noise of the Citadel, of the drilling initiates in the Bailey, and the rush of the churning Potomac to the east, Sarah could hear the chanting.

It was without any unified tone or cadence. It was not a marching song or an anthem, or any music concocted by a human ear. It was the war cry of the damned, a roar made from the scarred throats of a thousand post-human lungs at the heart of a destroyed city.

Elder Lyons leaned on the rampart rail and spoke quietly, so that his voice barely carried to the ears of his daughter. "'For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land.'"

Sarah Lyons found that she did not know what to say to that, so she remained silent.

In the distance, the Brotherhood's funeral song continued.

((()))

The Citadel was sealed at nightfall. All outlying sentry teams were recalled. The five-lock main gate ground closed on its titanic gears, each one-ton steel door lowered into place in its own time. Metal shutters across the face of E Ring slammed shut, creating a near-impenetrable first line of defense. The exterior spotlights went dark, reducing the Citadel's profile to a darkened monolith on the riverbank, backlit by the pale light of the moon.

In the bailey, initiates and knights drilled alongside one another, practicing hand-to-hand and small unit tactics in makeshift rings and plywood mockup environments. There was no target practice tonight—regardless of its necessity, there could be no waste of ammunition. The coming siege would run through their supplies easily enough without sinking rounds into straw dummies in the meantime.

Three Vertibirds, plundered and repainted in the wake of the Enclave conflict, sat in the heart of the courtyard. Groups of scribes huddled around the aircraft, pulling them open to better maintain their systems.

Arthur Maxson stood at the heart of it all, hands in the pockets of his officer's coat. He was just a squire, technically, but the subject of the inappropriateness of his not wearing the traditional robes of his rank had never been discussed. It was father's coat, something that held more than a few flavors of significance. More than just the rudeness of separating a boy from the only reminder of his dead father, taking the coat away would also mean disrespecting Arthur's family line—an egregious offense to the Brotherhood's past.

Arthur's ancestor, John Maxson, was the founder of the Brotherhood of Steel. Every tenant in their order, every totem they held dear, came directly from the legacy created for them by the original Elder Maxson. That Arthur was the sole inheritor of the Maxson line gave him a number of privileges, the least of which was the right to wear nonstandard clothing.

They put all of their hope into him. They said that his soul was forged of eternal steel, and that he would lead the Brotherhood into a grand new age of technological marvels.

Sometimes Arthur thought that was a lot of pressure to put on a ten year old.

His father was a large man, and the coat was still too big for the boy. It practically swallowed Arthur when worn fully. He typically pinned the sleeves back away from his hands, and tied the length of the coat tight at the back to keep it from dragging the floor. But he wore it anyway, almost every day, and took very good care of it.

One of the captured Vertibirds kicked its wingtip fan blades into gear. The downward force churned the dirt floor of the bailey into a storm of dust and grit, forcing Arthur to turn away and use the collar of his coat as a shield. He squinted and saw Sarah approaching him. She made a lateral chop of her hand over Arthur's head and the Vertibird engine died.

The Sentinel looked down at him. "Arthur."

"Sarah," he said, not meeting her eyes.

She crouched down beside him, the gears in her armor whirring in protest. "You want to get out of here?" she asked.

He looked around and realized that everyone in the bailey was watching him, staring from behind the impassive visages of their T-45 helmets. He knew the expressions they wore behind those steel faces and he was glad that he couldn't see them. It was those looks of hope that brought on the pressure and made him uneasy and sweaty.

"Yeah," he told Sarah.

"Okay." She smiled at him, and it would have been comforting if there hadn't been blood caked to her temple. "Come with me."

((()))

B Ring was quiet. Far from the war preparations in the bailey or the welding hell of the labs, or even the barking joviality of the barracks, this isolated section of the Citadel had become something of a safe haven for Arthur Maxson. These halls were at the heart of his childhood. They contained his room, the Elder's chambers, the headquarters of Lyons' Pride, and the quarters of their leader.

It was in those quarters that Arthur now sat, perched on Sarah's bed, his legs most of a foot off of the floor. He could hear the water running in the bathroom as Sarah washed her face in the sink, and when he leaned to the side he could see the broad silver back of her power armor.

It was a familiar sight. Most of his life had been spent in this building, and many of his best memories were in this room, listening to Sarah after she got back from patrol, telling funny tales of the Pride's missions. Sarah had always managed to turn what would in her father's hands be a simple boring debriefing into high adventure and daring heroism. The mutants became dastardly villains to be slain, and the Pride seemed like the perfect group of plucky heroes to do the slaying, with Sarah herself the fearless leader.

But now Clovin was dead, Vargas was in the medical center, and there didn't seem to be anything plucky about the dying Pride. The mutants had become more than clichéd antagonists to a child's musings. Arthur now saw them for what they were: barbarous monsters inimical to human life.

Sarah flicked the water off and walked back into the main room, running a dirty towel across her face. The gash across her temple had been cleaned but not eliminated. In time it would fade from a blood-red slice to a pink scar, but it would never fully disappear. The wound was too deep.

"Arthur," Sarah said, though she didn't seem sure enough to continue. Arthur stared at the mattress.

"We're losing," he said.

((()))

A moment of silence. Sarah had no idea what to say. She wasn't surprised that he had seen it—she knew quite well how bright Arthur Maxson could be. He was well learned for a child his age, especially for one growing up in a time when education was such an afterthought that it was all but forgotten. Growing up in the most secure location in the Wastes with the most intelligent tutors undoubtedly had much to do with that.

But Arthur was more than that. Those intelligent tutors were not forcing knowledge into the brain of an invalid. Arthur came from strong stock. He was naturally gifted and innately brilliant. Sarah had no doubt that he would have been a capable, bright kid no matter where he was raised, be that the Citadel or a southland swamp.

She knew his intelligence firsthand, and no one had hidden the truth from him: they were going to lose. The Citadel would be overrun. People would die.

But what she had never guessed was what to tell him when he brought it up. The silence dragged on.

"Yes," she said, in absence of anything useful. "We are losing."

"We're going to die," he said.

That she had a response for. "No, you aren't."

Arthur was still staring at the bed. A spasm wracked his shoulders, then another. Sarah frowned and knelt down, putting herself eye level with the boy.

"Look at me, Arthur."

He did, and his eyes were red and filled with tears.

"Stop crying," she said. "It doesn't help anything. It's a waste of time and clouds your head."

"But the Citadel—"

"Can't be saved by you alone. It will fall whether you want it to or not. You cannot stop that. What you can stop is your crying." Arthur felt cold steel on his cheek as she wiped a tear away. "And figure out what it is that you can do to help."

Arthur wiped his face with the too-long sleeves of his coat. "What happens when they get inside?"

"When they get inside?" Sarah stood and grabbed her laser rifle from the wall mount. "When they get inside, you get next to me. And you stay next to me until we get out of the Citadel."

"And if we don't?"

Sarah flicked the rifle's charge latch, eliciting a long whine of energy buildup in its battery chamber. The whine built until it stabilized. She clamped the rifle to her back, pulled a handgun from her combat webbing and tossed the weapon to the ten-year-old on the bed. The weight of it fell into his small hands and suddenly the seriousness of the situation overcame him.

"Then we die standing," she said.

**Author's Note: I had planned to upload this on Friday but two days of moving got in the way. Now I'm set up in a new apartment and the updates should become more weekly. This opening arc should carry us through next week and possibly the week after that. Not sure yet.**

**Next time you'll see more back-and-forth between the past and present as well as the first interactions between the Earthlings and their hosts on Nirn. In the meantime, please give me your thoughts.**

**Have a week.**


	4. Brotherhood's Fall III

Brotherhood's Fall III

There was a knock at the chamber door and Mirabelle Ervine stood to answer it, pausing only a moment to check that the sleeping boy had not moved.

"Who is it?" she asked.

"Tolfdir. Open up, Mirabelle. I've got water."

She did, and the old alchemical master made his way in with a bucket and towel. Bucket was an understatement. The old master had brought something more akin to a cauldron. He wrestled the massive pot into the corner, next to the child's bed, and set it down with a grunt.

"Is that large enough?" she asked, locking the door behind her.

The measure seemed excessive to her, but Savos's orders were Savos's orders, and she wasn't about to defy him. The new arrivals had put the Arch Mage in one of his commanding moods. Ervine would have found it attractive if the whole situation didn't scare the shit out of her.

"I had one of the new students get it. Onmund, I think. Seemed eager to please, so he brought me this bathtub of a bucket." Tolfdir shrugged. "How is the boy?"

Ervine stood next to him, watching the child. "He's healthy, strong, and hasn't moved a bit since we brought him down here. I'd think he was dead if he wasn't still breathing."

She watched Tolfdir sop a rag and wipe down the child's forehead, washing away what he could of the dried blood caked in the kid's hairline. Then he moved to the dirtied cheeks.

"Where is Marence?" he asked.

Ervine laughed. "She left an hour ago. Said she wanted to get some actual sleep tonight. I told her I'd keep watch."

"That's admirable."

"I'm known for that." Ervine leaned against the wall. "What about the other one?" she asked. "The animunculi."

"Unresponsive. Aren has it chained in the Hall."

"Any earthshaking revelations?"

"Well, it's human."

Ervine blinked. "Come again?"

"Human." Tolfdir didn't seem perturbed. "Female, actually."

"Did you speak with it? Her?"

"Not yet. She's still very much unconscious." Tolfdir dunked the rag again, soaking it. "The Arch Mage is attempting a meld with it as we speak."

"He's doing what?"

"A soul meld. I helped him begin the process." Tolfdir looked at her and smiled the warm grandfatherly smile that he was so famous for. "It's alright, Mirabelle. He'll be fine. No need to get frazzled."

"Sweet Dibella. A meld." Ervine crossed her arms and groaned. "What is wrong with you, Savos?"

Tolfdir kept smiling. "So, you call him Savos now?"

Ervine laughed despite herself. "Does everyone know?"

"Only those of us with eyesight, my dear."

"Oh, so what? We mages aren't known for our sneakery. What about Ancano? Does he know about our new friends?"

"Aren's trying to keep him out, at least for now. But you can bet he's asking questions about just what broke the courtyard."

"Damnable Thalmor."

"That sounded traitorous."

"Oh, he's a blinkered skeever and you know it!"

"You should stop making comparisons that belittle blinkered skeevers. They don't deserve that."

"You know I'm right."

"When have I ever disagreed with you?" Tolfdir looked at her. "Don't be so worried. This will resolve itself. Aren knows that."

She sighed and sat next to the bed, watching the old man work as she fingered sleep from her eyes. It had been six hours since the visitors plummeted into the College but she felt like she'd been up for days. The stress and confusion of it—the not knowing—was unbearable.

"What exactly are we dealing with here?" she asked.

For the second time she saw Tolfdir give his Tolfdir shrug. "I haven't the faintest."

"You sound cheerful."

"I absolutely am." He dipped the rag back into his oversized bucket and squeezed to wring out the grit. "We're mages. This is exactly the kind of thing we should crave: mystery, excitement, an unknown to discover. All those things that you don't find in a secluded fortress academy at the top of nowhere."

Ervine raised an eyebrow. Tolfdir was always upbeat, sure, but hearing such naivety out of the old mage was still strange.

"I never would have pegged you for the star-struck type, Tolfdir," she said.

Another shrug. "It's exciting. You and I can't possibly fathom where this boy has come from, what far off lands he might have seen."

"Or what that steel protector of his will do once it wakes," said Ervine.

Tolfdir looked ready to respond, but the words died in his throat when he looked over to see the child staring at him.

"Oh," he said. "Hello there."

Ervine looked at the boy, too. There was a long moment of silence in which the two mages watched him, and he watched them in turn.

"Do you understand me?" Tolfdir asked.

Eyes wide, the boy reached into his coat and felt the wound from which he had less than an hour previous been bleeding to death. He muttered something in surprise, but it wasn't any language that Ervine had ever heard.

"Evidently not," she told Tolfdir. "You understand him?"

The old man shook his head. "Not in the slightest."

"Maybe we should get Urab down here," she said, thinking of the orc tender of the archives. "If you need a language, bring a linguist."

"I suppose." Tolfdir pointed at the child. "Say, what do you think that is?"

Ervine looked and saw the child pull a metallic block from its belt, gripping it by the carved handle at its base. It wasn't large, no bigger than his hand really, and it had a small piece of piping protruding from the end opposite the handle.

Ervine had no idea what the device was or what it was supposed to do, but she could see the nervousness in the child's eyes and the way he never looked away from the two of them, even as he brought the box around in line with Tolfdir's chest.

"It's a weapon," she said.

Tolfdir looked at her. "How do you figure?"

There was a flash of light and crack of thunder. Something heavy and wet hit Mirabelle Ervine in the eyes and she screamed, falling back into the wall, blind. It was only once she had wiped the blood from her eyes that she saw Tolfdir on the ground next to her, a pool of blood forming around his waist.

And the child was gone, the door to the chamber slamming shut behind him.

((()))

Seven rounds left. Six in the clip, one in the chamber, and the eighth wedged somewhere in that old man's gut. The old man that had never done anything to him, who had never hurt him or done wrong by him or so much as raised a hand against him, and who was now shot and dying because he spoke in a funny language that he didn't understand.

Arthur closed his eyes and tried to keep the thoughts out of his head. Stupid. You didn't know him and he could have hurt you, stupid. You don't know where you are or what's going on so stay alive first and make friends later.

Sarah would have shot him.

Find Sarah. Sarah would know what to do.

Taking the grip of his pistol firmly in hand, Arthur Maxson leaned out of cover, trying to decide his next move. A hallway, long and made of stone. Torches on the walls. Old carpets on the floor. Like a castle. Was he in a castle? Did the transmitter toss them to a castle? Where would a castle even be? Was the transmitter a time machine, too? No, that was stupid.

Focus. Sarah. Where is Sarah?

Arthur shifted on his feet, looked behind him, faced front again. He felt incredibly lost and didn't know which way to go to find his way again. He really needed to pee.

"Crud," he muttered, and started off down the hallway.

A thousand lessons flashed through his head. Get small so they can't shoot you as easily and keep your head turning. Check everywhere all the time. Don't get blindsided. Don't lift your head, just turn it. Check that corner. Good. Plan your next move, don't jump without looking. Move along the wall. Hug your cover. Stop and listen. Nothing. Keep moving low…

Hallway after hallway, corner after corner. He kept his footsteps on the carpets when he could to muffle the noise and moved quickly wherever he couldn't, but there was still no idea of where to go besides the map he was slowly building in his mind.

Footsteps and voices from up ahead. Fast footsteps. Someone was running.

Arthur ducked down into an alcove and huddled up, his pistol held ready, and waited. The footsteps drew nearer and nearer until finally two men ran past him. They were both dressed like scribes, but their robes were long and tan, not the rust red of the Brotherhood. Their hoods were up and their backs were to him, so Arthur couldn't make out their faces, and they spoke in the same nonsense that the old man had spoken in, so he couldn't understand them, either.

What he could see was the glowing fire they clutched in their fists as they ran. He watched that fire until they disappeared into another hall and out of sight.

Arthur let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "Where the heck am I?" he muttered.

((()))

Savos Aren was in the bailey when the last gate failed and the mutants flooded the Citadel in tide of orange. He walked amongst the stilled ranks of the defenders, their armored forms halted mid-stride, mid-kill, mid-death, their pain and rage as still as the bursts of flame paused at the tips of their barrels. Brothers and sisters of steel held perfectly in place, not unlike clay figures in a diorama, as their observer moved amongst them, a ghost walker in a sea of statues.

It was a remarkably precise world, brought forth from the mind of someone concerned with precision and detail—a mind that was military from childhood. The soles of Aren's boots crunched gravel and he could smell war in the air, the stench of gunpowder and oxygen ionized by interlocking brackets of laser fire. And blood. Gallons of the stuff, leaking into the sandbags and rusted grates and dirt of a defiled fortress monastery, all reeking of vented life and hollow death.

There was anguish on the air, projected into the atmosphere by the nightmare's host. It was overpowering. The Brotherhood was dying, and Aren felt every death as though the context of memories from a lifetime he had never lived.

Paladin Myers screaming his hate into a mutant's face before detonating the plasma grenade clenched to his chest, incinerating a shared memory of her first kiss, a quick peck behind the analysis sector in B Ring where no one could see them.

Sister Valdez, her scavenged alarm clocks and habit for old pastries disappearing as a cleaver bit deep into her skull.

The man named Gunny, who had taught her how to walk, breathe and fight with pneumatic muscles and steel skin, screaming as he was dragged to the ground by five monsters, his limbs pulled from his body in a killing frenzy. An ignoble death for a hero.

Aren ducked, crossing under a mutant's arm as it extended toward Paladin Vargas's faceplate in the instant before it broke the man's neck and killed him. He made his way to the blister of sandbags and concrete at the heart of the courtyard, where a father and his daughter fought back-to-back, one minutes from death, the other elbow-deep in a monster's guts.

The arch mage took a deep breath and let the memory continue on its course.

((()))

Sarah grunted and pulled her fist free of the mutant's ribcage, taking its heart with her, and turned back to the larger fight. She appraised it in a heartbeat, and her appraisal was far from hopeful.

Heavy weapons teams in the courtyard eaves laid down a hail of suppressive fire. Missiles, turbo-laser volleys and whole boxes of minigun rounds tore down into the pressing wave. Mutants were ripped from their feet, their blood painting the cracked flagstones. Dozens of them died, but it mattered not. The monsters had weight of numbers on their side, and suddenly all the power that a Paladin had in one-on-one combat—the power that had made them the willing protectors of an uncaring wasteland—mattered as much as a lighter in a rainstorm.

The Brotherhood of Steel was about to die.

But it would not die quietly.

Sarah stood shooting, her armor painted with blood and oil. Some of it was from the enemy, most of it wasn't. She herself had yet to be hit, but it seemed that everyone around her had been.

Her rifle tracked and fired, nearly on autopilot, planting pinprick blasts of red heat into the faces and chests and eyeballs of the bastards defiling her home. She had often wondered what this moment would feel like. Would she be enraged? Would she scream and curse and wail? Would she abandon all sense and charge into the melee, wrenching necks and beating the enemy with her fists?

In the end she learned that her training was too much for all that. In the end, she simply treated this battle like any other firefight. Target acquisition and elimination never changed. The kick of her rifle against her shoulder never changed. Stabbing something in the neck never changed. No matter the theater—a broken street, train tunnel, or the structure she was raised in—war never changed.

Her father was at her side. The Elder struck out with his sledge and collapsed a mutant's head, bursting the brain case in a torrent of red. His follow-through brought him low over the collapsing torso, wrestling the weapon's weight around for another strike. Sarah fired over his bent form, drilling a quick burst into a mutant toting a rocket launcher. The beast collapsed under her shots.

Her father looked at her as he straightened, and though his face was unreadable behind the muzzle and visor of his helmet, she could see his smile. It was a brief moment, ending an instant later as more of the beasts came to kill them.

"Where is Arthur?" he shouted, his sledge connecting with another body in a thunderous crack.

Sarah pivoted, dodging a punch. "With Gallows!"

The mutant above her brought his arm around and she threw her rifle down to intercept it, never to be retrieved. She grabbed the creature's wrist in both hands and pulled it to the ground. Her ripper was in hand a second later, and it digging through the monster's throat a second after that.

"Get to Arthur." Her father's voice was immediate and close, coming in over the close-range radio circuit in her helmet, even though she had lost sight of him in the melee. "Keep him safe."

"I'm staying here! We can get to him later!"

"Sarah, look."

She did. In just a few seconds, the situation had gone from horrible to irreparable. Their line had collapsed. There was no semblance of order to the slaughter any more, just random acts of horrific violence playing out across the complex.

Brothers and Sisters died everywhere. Paladin Grieves was smashed through a wall. Paladins Barter and Tarn died together, ripped in half by the same tear of minigun fire. Their shredded armor hit the flagstones, leaking blood and sparks. Sister Greer, a mere initiate, brought down two of the monsters before three got hold of her. One pulled her arm off, another her leg. The third pushed her screaming torso to the ground and left it to a centaur.

Her screams didn't last much longer.

This was the moment they lost, she realized. This was the end of it all.

"Get to Arthur," her father repeated. "Get him to the labs. Use the Matter Transmitter. Get as many of the survivors out as possible."

Sarah retrieved her rifle and stood tall. Her father had moved away, a few meters and twenty combatants away, fighting for his life in the thick of the horde. His economy of movement was astounding, mixing the brutality of his weapon with careful footwork. Any mutant stupid enough to enter the reach of his super sledge died. He was incredible, a force of nature. The embodiment of a Brother of Steel.

The warrior in her was impressed. The soldier in her gave him three minutes to live. The daughter in her realized that these were the last words she would share with her father.

She keyed her communications suite. "I'll keep them safe, sir."

"I know you will, Sarah." He looked at her then, across the killing field. "Now go. I'll hold them."

The northern wall collapsed, a thousand stones and storm of smoke washing into the courtyard like a wave. The carcass of a vertibird plummeted through the debris and crashed into the press of bodies, its remaining flight fan carving a swathe through the combatants. Its fuselage gutted, the flier came to a rest against the back of the bailey, hissing electrical fire in its death throes.

Sarah felt the ground quake as the machine's killer lumbered into view. Lips peeled back in a rictus grin, its flesh the mottled color of diseased intestines, the largest behemoth on record entered the Citadel. It dragged the other half of the vertibird behind it as a child would drag a toy. Its younger kin swarmed past its feet, pouring through the hole in the wall, weapons firing. Another dozen brothers and sisters dropped with the reinforcements.

"No," she breathed. "No, no, no."

"Brothers and sisters!" her father shouted, still fighting, trying to salvage what was left of the defense. "Stand with me! Fight! In the name of Founder Maxson and the Old World Reborn, fight!"

He surged forward, backed by the last thirty of his Chapter, killing and blasting their way against the ocean, directly for the behemoth. It took all of Sentinel Lyons's self-control to keep from running to their aid, but the weight of the last order given her by a father, leader, and priest turned her away, into the halls of the Citadel.

"Gallows," she radioed, slamming the breach door shut behind her, "do you have the squire?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Sarah locked the titanium seals into place and sealed the door as best she could. It could withstand direct artillery fire, though she felt sure it wasn't rated against kicks from titanic genetic freaks. If the Elder finished the behemoth, she figured the door would hold for fifteen minutes, twenty at most.

If the behemoth lived, it wouldn't even be five.

"Head to the lab deck," she said. "We're leaving."

Even that gave the unflappable Gallows pause. "Leaving, ma'am?"

"Elder's orders," she said, disconnecting the link directly after and marching deeper into the complex, trying to quash the lump in her throat and tremor in her voice.

Twenty feet and twenty-seven hours behind her, Savos Aren followed suit, walking along the trail left by her echoing footfalls.

**Author's Note: Kinda short and all over the place, but I just wanted to get something out so I wasn't two weeks without an update. Thanks so much to anyone who has read and taken the time to review. I'm glad people are digging the writing style, and I'm sorry that I have had some canonical fuck-ups (what with a Dunmer being called a Breton and the like). I typically believe that showing is better than telling, but I get that this is a serial medium and waiting for answers isn't fun for some, so figured I'd address one or two of those cannon issues here.**

**The Lone Wanderer died activating Project Purity, and the events of Broken Steel played out without his intervention. The Brotherhood defeated the Enclave, but sustained heavy losses, enough to allow the super mutants to overpopulate and overwhelm them.**

**As for the timeline, the bulk of the story is concurrent with the events of _Skyrim_, though with the notable addition of two people from Earth in the way. This will keep it from being a boring "here's the story of the game in prose" story.**

**There is a Dragonborn.**

**Tonally, a lot of the story will concentrate on building characters, the relationship between Earth and Nirn, and exploring and expanding the mythos of both franchises in a shared world-space. For instance: Nirn and Earth are not treated as different realities, but rather as two distinct planets within two distinct planetary systems in the same galaxy.**

**But more on that at a later date. Have a week.**


	5. Brotherhood's Fall IV

Brotherhood's Fall IV

Matter transmission. Pre-war tech, created by a joint black book contract between Hudson Bay Atomics and Keeler Fusion United, funded and sanctioned by the old American government—a device to facilitate rapid-as-light transportation of supplies and manpower from one point to another, or to recall such resources just as quickly.

Teleportation, in so many words.

The matter transmitter was going to change the face of the American military machine, give the nation an edge in the global conflicts of the time and eliminate mutually assured destruction. The finger on the button didn't matter if an enemy could teleport in and vaporize the finger. Enough transmitters might have made the difference between a vibrant future and a dead one.

Unfortunately, only one was ever completed. Constructed and tested in the Highlands Facility deep in the heart of Lost Jersey, the transmitter had waited out the long years, gathering dust before the Brotherhood recovered it.

They restored the machine, brought it to full order in the aftermath of the Enclave debacle and began using it for scouting purposes. The device had only been fired a dozen times, but each time it had been a success.

Sarah understood how it worked only in the metaphorical "imagine this apple is space/time and this fork is your ship" way that all non-Scribes understood high technology. The transmitter created a door between two places in space, allowing matter on the pad to trade places with an equal mass on the other end. An imperfect trade could result in defragmentation and loss of the subject being transmitted.

Which was all well and good for an understanding of the device when you're just the one being transmitted.

Actually conducting the transmission was another feat entirely.

((()))

Sarah Lyons pulled her helmet off and wiped a strand of sweat-soaked hair out of her face. The overhead lamps shook as another explosion wracked the Citadel. She breathed deeply, trying to calm herself, trying to make sense of the control console. Her armored fingers flew over the keyboard, inputting half-remembered commands as quickly as she could.

/input::resonance_increase/

/regard::positive/

The transmitter's tesla coils crackled and banged to life. Tendrils of violet lightning teased from coil to coil and snapped at the transmitter pad, warming the tiles to a glow.

/input::select::targeting_matrix/

/regard::positive/

Sarah swung around to the targeting console, an old Arimax terminal bolted on the front of a sparking server stack. The screen was large enough to allow for huge, specific streams of three-dimensional coordinates to be input, allowing the transmitter to move matter to the right location.

Which was nice, but Sarah had no idea how to work it.

"Shit." She slammed her helmet back into place and keyed the radio. "Gallows, this is Sarah. Can you hear me?"

Nothing. Not even static. She tried again.

Savos Aren stood behind her, watching her through a haze of memory. He watched the transmitter spark and roar into readiness, a machine beyond his capacity for imagining.

He understood teleportation, of course. He had seen that trick a hundred times in a hundred forms. From aedric walking stones and wayshrines to daedric seventh angle doors, or the primitive moonstaves and dream tubers of the less-advanced races.

But those were all based in magick. This transmitter, like the rest of this nightmare memory, was beyond his scope of experience.

A door smashed open across the room and another silver warrior made entrance. He carried a child—the child. Aren knew at once that this was Gallows. He could feel the memory coil around the man, wrapping him in remembrances of longing and missed opportunities, the target of a hundred of Sarah Lyons' what ifs and unrealized daydreams.

There was something between them. Not nearly so intense to be called love but still beyond the simple bonds of fellow warriors. Something deep and unrequited.

Aren knew that all in an instant, just as he knew that the man would not be amongst those to leave this chamber alive.

Sarah turned from the console. "Take this," she said, and Gallows fell into place immediately, passing the boy to her.

"He was hit," was all he said.

She looked at the child. Blood soaked through his jacket from a wound to the stomach. He was breathing but otherwise unresponsive.

"What happened?" she asked, feeling the wound with her fingers. "This isn't a bullet wound."

Gallows didn't look away from the terminal. His hands were a blur—he knew exactly how it functioned, which was no surprise. Good old jack of all trades Gallows.

"Shrapnel," he said, nodding to the shredded remains of his right pauldron. "If I hadn't shielded him…"

He let the implication hang between them. Sarah held the boy tighter.

"Do you have a lock yet?" she asked.

Gallows nodded. "Somewhere upstate. Maximum transmission range."

"There's a maximum?"

"There's a safe maximum." He turned away and began making the final preparations on the mainframe. "Not sure there even is an upper limit if you were to offline the inhibitors. Then again, not sure you'd live long enough to test it. Might want to step on the platform, ma'am."

Aren watched Lyons take her place, though he could feel her reluctance. Everything happening around her screamed running from a fight. It wasn't something she did with grace.

"Finish up and get over here."

"I'd rather like to make sure it works right. Auto-cycle can be a bit twitchy." He scooped her helmet off the console and tossed it to her. "Need a weapon?"

She ignored the offer. "I don't care about twitchy, Gallows. Get over here."

Something heavy smashed against the blast door, denting it in the center. Another smash came a second later, followed by a third, fourth, fifth. The monsters were coming through.

Gallows hit the activation stud, then looked at her and lied. "I'll be right behind you, Sentinel."

Sarah Lyons fitted her helmet into place and crouched down on the platform. The machinery beneath her banged into life, sending arcs of violet energy surging up and around the transmission coils. Gallows worked the console with one hand, managing the input for a safe but quick build-up. With his other he unclipped his last three grenades from his belt, setting them along the top of the console. The clock was ticking.

The coils built to their energetic apex, the globes at their summits knocking out flashes of alternating hues. Tendrils of lightning teased at the edges of Sarah's armor. She knelt lower, covering Arthur as best she could.

The door blew inward. Gallows was in motion before the first mutant made it in, planting a live grenade in the entranceway within a second of the breach. He rolled across the console and brought his rifle into position. The grenade detonated. Shrapnel flooded the chamber and Sarah turned from the sight, taking the brunt of the fragments against her shoulders.

She stayed like that, and did not see Gallows die. Her memory of the man's demise was not of a sight seen, but rather a fog of interpreted sounds heard over the roar of the building transmitter, and what her mind's eye made of them. What Savos Aren saw in that moment was Sarah Lyons' imagination run wild in the worst moment of her life. It was not pretty.

Quick bursts of automatic fire. Bullets sparking from everywhere, ricochets in the close confines. The flat bang of a combat shotgun. A light shatters. Gallows throws another grenade. The explosion flattens the lab lights. Something roars and dies in the doorway. More growls and howls as the horde moves in. Gallows' last bit of fire wounds one and then they're on him, punching and smashing. A knife slides between his armor plates and pries them aside. Most of his stomach empties onto the floor. He screams and kicks, a futile gesture made by a dying man.

Yellowed hands rip his helmet off. His scream loses the tinny filter of the helmet. Another blade, this one into his throat. Blood wells from his mouth, sprayed through gritted teeth. The scream becomes a gurgle. He pulls the pin on his final grenade.

The explosion was closer this time. The concussion blew out her right audio pickup. She fell sideways. In her periphery, one of the tesla globes shattered. Unrestrained energy spilled out of it. Ropes of unreal color flashed around the lab, whipping the walls and ceiling, digging white-hot gouges in stone and steel.

The inhibitors are gone, she realized.

There was a flash of white, a flash of black, and suddenly the lab and smoke and pain were all gone and she was falling through the skies of a world undreamt of. No time to think, no time to adjust, no time to do anything more than hug Arthur tight and smash into the ground.

There was the abrupt crimson pain of her steel-shod skull hitting cold stone, then darkness.

((()))

Savos Aren opened his eyes and sat back. The soul gem left his hand and dropped to the floor, its surface dimming with every second. Aren held his face in his palms and breathed, trying to think his own thoughts once more. It had been too long since his last meld.

He had forgotten the hollowness that filled the heart afterwards. That smothering, all-encompassing hollowness that rendered deep breaths shallow and warm rooms cold. He wondered how long it would take to pass this time. A day? Three?

"Too long," he muttered, and realized he had spoken in Lyons' tongue.

That had never happened before. He had melded with individuals that spoke other languages in the past, but all of them still spoke and thought in Meric Common. The woman next to him, however, had never heard of the Common speak, had never heard a word in any language besides her native one, and couldn't help but think in it.

"Fascinating," he said, rolling the word around on his lips. "Fascinating!"

Gears whirred and steel fingers smashed into a death grip around Aren's throat. He was pulled in close, so that his cheek touched the cold metal of the armor's faceplate.

"What's that, mutie?" growled Lyons.

Aren choked out a line of bile. Her grip was too tight to do anything else. Pricks of starlight swam at the edge of his vision.

Sarah got to her feet, still holding the Arch Mage. She lifted him clear of the ground, letting him dangle by the throat.

"How about I pull your damn head off? Is that fascinating?"

She tossed him across the room with the ease of a man tossing a sack of apples. Aren landed on his chest and rolled, coming to a wheezing stop against the wall. He coughed and gasped air back into his lungs. Sarah stalked over to him, each footfall making a slight tremor. A boot pressed between his shoulder blades and forced him face-down into the stonework.

"Where am I?"

Aren grunted. "You didn't get anything."

"Anything what?" The boot pressed. Pain bloomed across his ribs.

"The meld! The soul meld. Some information should have passed both ways. An impression, at least. An awareness of another's presence."

"Speak English!"

Oh, the irony. Aren grinned despite the pain.

"Let me up and I'll explain everything."

"Think we'll just keep it parked here for now, sport. I like my little grey-blue men facedown where I can see them."

Her words were flippant and brave, but there was something else lining her voice. Perhaps it was just the fleeting impressions left upon him by the melding process or just the optimism of an academic breaking new ground, but Aren recognized what he felt was worry in the woman's words. She wasn't entirely in control now, not after everything. Not with Arthur unaccounted for.

The boot pressed down. More pain.

His hands were free. He could try something brave—a lightning bolt to knock her off balance, a telekinetic hurl to send her away for a minute. She would see none of them coming.

Or he could play it safe, recognize her for the wounded warrior that she had become, and use his knowledge to help her.

"Sarah."

"What?" She knelt. "What did you just say?"

Aren cleared his throat. "Your name is Sarah Lyons. You're a sentinel of the Brotherhood of Steel. Your father is Elder Owyn Lyons. The Citadel fell before you were knocked out. You took Arthur and escaped using the matter transmitter."

Sarah paused. "You have Arthur, then. He told you everything."

"Right and wrong."

"Clarify that or I _will_ crush you."

"The boy is safe, Sarah, though still unconscious. My pupils have healed his wounds and tend to him even now." Aren sighed. "He has told us nothing. I looked inside your memories to determine if you were a threat or not."

"Right. What did that tell you?"

"I believe you are a friend. I'd rather not rethink it."

Aren curled his fingers and focused, generating a singularity of concentrated lightning within his palm. A crackle of pent-up energy echoed around the Hall of Elements.

Sarah saw his hand, and though she had never seen anything like it before, still recognized it as a threat.

"If you think that's going to help you—" she started.

"I do, it will, and you need to understand that I am neither a mutant nor your enemy." He twisted his head to get a sidelong look at the woman. "My name is Savos Aren. I am a friend, whether you can see it now or not."

Another silence passed between the two, broken only by the growl of a fusion battery and the clash of compressed nature.

"Two things," she said at last. "One: you show me Arthur immediately."

"Of course."

"Two: you put the lightning away and keep your hands where I can see them at all times. Break a condition and I break your neck. This isn't a good day to mess with me."

"So I have seen. You have my word, Sarah."

The boot was lifted and Aren could breathe again. He stood, trying to ignore the pain in his torso. A simple alleviation cant would do away with it, but the Arch Mage doubted his hostile guest could tell the difference between restoration and destruction. He kept his hands visible and let the lightning die away.

Which was good; he wasn't convinced the bolts could penetrate her steel skin, anyway.

"Arthur." Lyons stood chest-to-chest with the smaller elf, her muzzled faceplate inches from his nose. "Now."

He nodded and indicated the door. "That way. But I must tell you in advance, my pupils are likely around."

"Pupils?"

"Yes. This is a place of learning." He searched for the word in his new osmosis-tongue. "A college."

"That's funny."

There was chunk of a wood block hitting stone and the Hall doors opened. Mirabelle Ervine rushed in, flanked by two of the first year novices. She stopped when Lyons turned to face her.

Flames appeared in Ervine's fingers and in the fingers of her students. "Savos—" she started.

Aren heard the synthetic muscles in Lyons' warplate tense like the coils of a spring. He reached up and set a hand on her shoulder, hoping it would calm the warrior. Perhaps it did not, but she at least remained still.

"Peace, Mirabelle," he said, focusing on forming the words in Common. "Sarah is a friend."

Ervine looked between her superior and the Sentinel. "Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure."

Lyons looked at him. "What are you telling her?"

"That you aren't an enemy," Aren said.

Ervine frowned. "She can't understand me?"

"No." Aren smiled. "I picked up some of her language during the meld, though. It's amazing, Mirabelle, what I've seen. Truly—"

She cut him off. Her voice was the one she used when disciplining first years and debating politics. The scary voice.

"Savos," she said, "we've lost the child."

**Author's Note: Apologies for the lateness. This will get more regular in the next few weeks, with updates likely every Monday. Easier to write on weekends, I find, than scribbling throughout the week to hit a Friday update.**

**I'm happy to see that the feedback has been so overwhelmingly positive, and the criticism so astute and constructive. It's nice to see this story, with such a specific focus, has found the intelligent side of fandom.**

**So thanks for reading, and have a week!**


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